One or more aspects relate, in general, to virtual memory of a computing environment, and in particular, to managing memory heaps of the virtual memory.
Virtual memory heaps are used by various object-oriented managed runtime environments, including, but not limited to, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) runtime environment, Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment, and the Smalltalk environment, as examples. The heap is the primary memory resource for such environments.
Each heap provides memory for objects of the environment, and thus, may be referred to as an object heap. An object heap includes many objects, each of which is, for instance, an instance of a class, such as a JAVA class. A heap is managed by managing the memory space of the heap, including performing garbage collection to reclaim memory space that is no longer used by the objects of the heap and reallocating new objects.